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Dessert

Lemon or Orange Filling

A sweet citrus filling made from lemon or orange juice, rind, sugar, egg yolks, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lemon or Orange Filling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix the juice and grated rind of one lemon with sugar, beaten egg yolks, milk, and salt.

  2. Cook in a double boiler, stirring constantly until thickened.

  3. Let it cool before spreading.

Orange variation

  1. For orange filling, substitute the lemon with the juice and grated rind of one orange and add lemon juice.

  2. Prepare the same way as lemon filling.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as they set with gentle heat, giving it a rich, smooth body.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharp citrus juice.
Lemon
Supplies the main tart flavour and aroma from its juice and grated rind.

The step that matters

Cook in a double boiler, stirring constantly until thickened. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if they get too hot. Gentle indirect heat and constant stirring let the yolks thicken the mixture smoothly without lumps.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, egg, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Blueberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, egg, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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